Lake Tahoe calls this week. Next post July 26, 2010.
July 19, 2010
July 15, 2010
The Radicalism of the Anti-Arizona Suit
City after city in Democratic California have condemned or begun to boycott Arizona over their new immigration law. What foolishness. Keep in mind the reason the California Democratic Party is all for illegal workers: new voters and new union members! Be sure to vacation in Arizona this year if you can!
by Rich Lowry at National Review, July 15, 2010
Arizona’s immigration law is reasonable; the suit against it isn’t. If nothing else, the State of Arizona has smoked out the Obama administration.
To make the case that the Arizona immigration law conflicts with, and therefore is preempted by, federal law, the Justice Department has to make an extraordinary claim — that the federal laws as written don’t matter so much.
The drafters of the Arizona statute, S.B. 1070, were careful to mimic specific federal laws, but that’s not good enough. The state’s law would pass constitutional muster only if it tracked exactly with the executive’s enforcement priorities. As the suit puts it, “S.B. 1070’s mandatory enforcement scheme will conflict with and undermine the federal government’s careful balance of immigration enforcement priorities and objectives.”
In other words, such mandatory enforcement of the law conflicts with the executive’s discretionary enforcement of the law. If Arizona’s statute is in keeping with the letter of the laws as passed by Congress, so what? The executive can selectively pick and choose which elements of those laws to honor, and then on that basis quash state statues even if they mirror the handiwork of Congress.
It’s as if Congress is merely an advisory body in this area, and the administration wants to lift the power over immigration policy out of Article 1 of the Constitution and deposit it in Article 2. The administration is forced into this sweeping argument out of its desperation to overturn the Arizona law and its limited grounds to do so on any common-sense basis.
The courts have upheld the ability of state law enforcement to check on a person’s immigration status, ask for his documents, and confirm his status with the federal government. And it’s simply not the case that any state statute regarding immigration is preempted by federal law. In 1976, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a California law prohibiting employers from hiring illegal aliens against a preemption challenge.
By any reasonable standard, Arizona is assisting the federal government. The state is identifying people that Congress has deemed to be in the country unlawfully and bringing them to the attention of the feds. Why would the federal government even want to cry foul?
It all comes back to that delicate balance. The suit says, “S.B. 1070 conflicts with and otherwise stands as an obstacle to Congress’s demand that federal immigration policy accommodate the competing interests of immigration control, national security and public safety, humanitarian concerns, and foreign relations.”
And all that amounts to an indirect way of saying that the Obama administration is willing to tolerate the presence of millions of illegal aliens in this country, and that, as far as it’s concerned, this preference constitutes the unalloyed law of the land.
There would be an unassailable method for the federal government to push back against Arizona. Congress could repeal 8 USC 1304(e) and 1306(a), the provisions in the federal code invoked in the Arizona statute (they make it illegal for aliens not to carry registration documents and for aliens to fail to register). Then, Congress could pass an immediate amnesty, relieving the current population of illegal aliens of the burdens of their unlawful presence.
Simple and clean. But not easy, since it would require the assent of democratically accountable legislators. The Obama administration prefers to rely on the sheer assertion of administrative authority. Its suit against Arizona posits a kind of virtual amnesty. If its claims pass muster in the courts, the most aggrieved institution shouldn’t be the state of Arizona, but the United States Congress.
July 13, 2010
Pension Fund Debacle
Americans for Prosperity California strips away some of the hyperbole surrounding the pension fund disaster faced by the State’s retirement systems. This is one of those rare instances that the Governor has it right.
Quiz any candidate standing for election this year. If they don’t or won’t understand this issue, let them know your frustration.
July 12, 2010
Cantor predicts GOP takeover of House
By Michael O’Brien at The Hill, July 12, 2010
Republicans will win back a majority of seats in this fall’s election, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) predicted 16 weeks before Election Day.
Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican, said he expected his party to win enough seats in this November’s midterm elections to take over control of the House next year.
"I think we retake the House, as Mr. Gibbs suggested yesterday from the White House," Cantor said during an appearance on CNBC. "That will change the dynamic, for sure."
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on Sunday said that Republicans were within striking distance of taking over either the House or Senate, if not both.
"I think people are going to have a choice to make in the fall, but I think there’s no doubt there are enough seats in play that could cause Republicans to gain control," Gibbs said Sunday on NBC’s "Meet the Press."
Cantor and other top Republicans have professed a sense of optimism about this fall’s elections, in which they hope to make major inroads, including occasional predictions about a takeover of the House or Senate. But the leaders have been wary of pegging a number of seats they expect to win this fall, with the GOP needing to pick up 39.
The minority whip, who would probably become majority leader if Republicans take over the House, framed the elections as an opportunity to challenge the Obama administration on spending and other issues.
"When we regain the House — because I do think that we will retake the majority — the president will have to deal with us," Cantor said. "I mean, there is leverage now that the American people will have over the ability to stop spending, over telling the administration ‘no’ on a lot of these harmful policies to small business."
July 9, 2010
Pension ‘pain train’ coming
The discussion by our political class regarding the State’s budget crisis is woefully uninformed unless we all get a grasp on the realities of the tidal wave of debt swelling from public sector retirement. The Governor (amazingly) has the right end of the stick on this one.
By Katy Grimes, at Cal Watchdog, July 8, 2010
California’s private sector employees are not only paying for their own pensions and retirement funds, they are paying for the pensions of public sector employees, according to Governor Schwarzenegger. In his pension fund roundtable meeting today Schwarzenegger said, “We don’t have enough money,” to continue funding the state’s public pension fund liability.
California has $500 billion in unfunded pension debt – that’s half a trillion dollars. Even if the state froze pensions today, California would still be upside down in pension debt by billions of dollars.
According to roundtable participant San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi, “San Francisco pays $1.2 billion every year for the city employees’ pensions and health care, but has cut summer school, gives out $80 parking tickets, and we charge people to come to our parks.” Adachi said that when he was elected, he analyzed the budget and asked, “Where is all the money going?” He said that when no one could answer him, he started doing his own research and discovered that the city employee pensions cost 28 times more than what the city spends on street repairs and maintenance.
Adachi has introduced a ballot initiative that would require city workers to contribute 9 percent to 10 percent to their own pensions, and double their contributions to dependents health care coverage from 25 percent to 50 percent. Adachi, a self-described progressive, said his initiative gathered 75,000 signatures when only 3,000 were needed, demonstrating vast support for the change.
In 1999, the Legislature passed SB400, to retroactively increase pension benefits by 20 percent to 50percent, authored by Democrat Sen. Deborah Ortiz and coauthored by Democrat Sen. John Burton, and Assembly members Lou Correa, D-Santa Ana, Anthony Pescetti, R-Sacramento, and Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento. Gov. Gray Davis signed the bill. Some state political analysts said the bill was a gift to unions for putting Democrats back in charge of the state after 16 years of Republican rule.
Governor Schwarzenegger is proposing a roll back of pension benefits to pre-1999 benefit levels. He wants to require employees to contribute to their own pensions, base the retirement rate on the three highest years of wages of employment instead of the one-year calculation now used, and require full disclosure by state pension funds and “honest funding of pension promises when promises are made.”
At the meeting, the governor’s special jobs and economic adviser David Crane, said that SB400 was only supposed to cost $648 million in the 2010-11 budget year however, the actual cost will be nearly $4 billion, 2,000 percent higher than 10 years ago. The projections were based on assumptions that the stock market boom in the 1990s would continue indefinitely. Crane said that the California Public Employee Retirement System (CalPERS) believed it could cover any additional costs through “continued excess returns” and expected that contributions from the state would hold steady at $350 million. Crane explained that the actual pension costs began at $145 million in year 2000, and are $3.8 billion this year. He said however, that the increases started well before the stock market crash of 2008, and that the CalPERS Board signed off on the pension changes without ever asking questions about how it could possibly be sustained.
CalPERS Board member Tony Oliveira said the biggest problem was that SB400 passed without any scholarly analysis. “Now the pain train is still coming, and locals are going to take it on the chin.” Oliveira said that his own county will be experiencing 35 percent increases.
Former Democratic Assemblyman Joe Nation (2000-06) and co-author of AB32, California’s global warming act, said that he was not in the Legislature in 1999 and did not vote for SB400, “however had I been, I probably would have because every other Democrat did and most Republicans did – because they didn’t even think about it.” Nation said, “You cast votes because it’s what the caucus recommends.” Nation added, “We need to step back and think about things, look at the facts. Facts are pretty stubborn things.”
Nation is correct – SB400 was supported by both parties, passed unanimously in the Senate, with only seven members of the state Assembly voting against it.
Crane was critical of the Legislature and questioned why not no one asked, “What happens if the stock market doesn’t continue to go up?” Referring to the dot.com and stock market boom of the 1990s, and the assumption that it would continue, Crane said the assumptions were entirely based on the Dow Jones rising. However, according to Crane, if the stock market doesn’t perform at the 1990s boom level, even with a rise, pension costs will still be higher, “even worse than these costs.”
Sen. Dennis Hollingsworth, R-Murrieta, tried to address the existing pension crisis by authoring SB919, however it was voted down along party lines. The measure would have increased the retirement age from 55 to 65, and required state employees to make higher contributions to their retirement accounts. The measure would also require retirement benefits be based on the three highest years of wages, instead of the using only the current highest single year.
Explaining that there once was a time when there were trade offs between higher paying private sector jobs and better benefits in public sector jobs, Hollingsworth said that today the public sector benefits are much greater than the private sector in both areas. But Hollingsworth stressed that the argument is that “pensions must be sustainable.”
Northwestern University Professor Joshua Rauh, author of The Liabilities and Risks of State-Sponsored Pension Plans … explained the dire financial situation of the state’s pension crisis, and how easily the pension funds got into trouble, because of lawmakers’ and board CalPERS members’ unrealistic assumptions about the stock market.
Rauh said that policy makers need to understand the facts and warned that with current pension promises, CalPERS and CalSTRS will run out of money by fiscal year 2026-27.
The governor told Rauh, “[G]ood luck making policy makers understand what you just said.”
